


The Flare

by lunariviera



Series: The Halves [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abstract, Depressed!Castiel, Literary Theory, M/M, No Dialogue, No Plot, No Sex, Philosophy, Plotless, Poetry, Prose Poem, Theology, angels as inhuman, angels as messengers, e.m. cioran, god has left the building, intersections, it's like the heart sutra of fanfiction okay, jerusalem by william blake, no anything, nonfiction fanfiction, philosophical angst, pining!Castiel, prose poetry, the trace, there are stars & insects though, third person to second person, two halves of a whole, warrior!castiel, william blake printer & engraver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-08 23:29:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1960242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunariviera/pseuds/lunariviera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find<br/>Nor can his Watch Fiends find it: tis translucent & has many Angles<br/>But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within<br/>Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven<br/>(William Blake, <em>Jerusalem</em> 37:15-18)</p><p>An angel overhears the prayer of a hunter, but doesn't reveal himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Flare

**Author's Note:**

> The other half of [The Trace](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1912569).

> _The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them? —E.M. Cioran_ , On the Heights of Despair 

•

He doesn't know where he is. He usually doesn't, until asked—when you can be anywhere at any time given any notice, does it matter, where you are? Where is here. This is now. He hardly notices even when he tries.

He slideslips, drifts, wanders, watches, studies the smallest things: binaries, virions, neutron degeneracy, hymenoptera. Lulls inside an unoccupied pause, logs aeons of avoidance rather than face his ever-bloodier duties. There are places to hide all over the so-called observable universe and he has found many not yet known, tens of thousands even on this most inhabited planet, uncrowded spaces, undiscovered gaps and lacunae—

He comes into convergence only when he hears his name; stills, inclines inwardly toward the call, considers it, considers. Revolves where he is, searches where he might locate himself this time.

(He finds he often gravitates toward bodies of water, rivers, streams, landlocked lakes, but could be on a bench by the rive gauche of the Seine on a busy Wednesday at noon or as easily slipping dusty feet cautiously into the Nile by moonlight ten thousand years before the new humans arrive, either way abstracted water in general is of more interest to him than its temporary coherence. Each molecule carries its identity and he recognizes some of them and listens attentively to the ones he hasn't heard before, the most minute things have their narratives and while they are deceptively simple ones ( _I am here, I am myself, this is me doing me_ ) he finds them soothing in their taut folded complexity—)

(Ceteris paribus, he would rather be incarnate. Since his kind began to move again among people he has tried many forms of being visible, audible, perceptible—useful for addressing and for hearkening, _interacting_ they call it; he has experienced, sampled, looped, remixed, slipped, adjusted, moved the gain, redshifted and blueshifted until he found a way to be near them. For the most part this exercise of dopplering photons into detectability exhausts him even when inside a vessel. But the vessel makes it easier, makes it make sense. And in the vessel he can experience the many stories of the many tiny things in such different ways—)

The prayer comes in on a different frequency, ragged and scraped, dissonant against the reassuring white noise of his kin. There is a blossoming of the flare in his mind, a distinct shape it takes on, sharply drawn petals of a lotus rising from hushed water, golden edged, starting to burn—

(Prayer, he has learned, generally contains not much more than helpless grasping and pleading. He cannot respond to this kind of prayer, no action on his part would be helpful, he could alter no outcome. Sometimes this angers the prayerful, his ineffectuality, and he suspects they wanted something else, some gesture on his part, of atonement or comfort; but his elders did not construct him to dispense solace, he is built along another model, if there is no opponent to attack he cannot imagine his presence would bring anything but frustration and perhaps even more discomfort—)

But this prayer rises, keens, ripples outward in ever more ringing cries and speaks his name specifically, repeatedly, in a familiar voice—

He collects his spectra into a single alignment and locates himself temporally, he seems to be crouched by a large pool of brackish rainwater in a motel parking lot on his assigned continent. It is sunset, he decides, squinting upward, not sunrise, by the shape and specific hue of the sludgy rainbows congealing on the water's oil-coated surface. When humans break down carbon in such vast global processes, accelerating its decay cycle, they unwittingly create this kind of odd beauty. Oil from under the rocks plus water on top of the rocks equals a misplaced rainbow. He has, he realizes, been studying this puddle for quite some time, many hours, perhaps all day. Possibly it has drawn unwanted attention—

He straightens slowly, looks around though the physical gesture is unnecessary, even incarnated he can see panoptically; he discerns no human life, but outside of rods and cones the discernible multiplies into seething isotropic variety, even this seemingly empty space teems with a soft flush of life—

The prayer comes one more time, fainter now, tinged with defeat, just his name, nothing more. He taps softly along the thread of it until he is all but touching the other end, that reluctantly bowed proud head and tear-stung eyes, that combative grim veneer, that sense of being fundamentally unworthy of reciprocation. More oddly yet, he can tell it hasn't been spoken yet. The prayer will not be uttered, even inwardly, for several more hours. But the man who speaks it will be in this place, which, he supposes, is why he is here. He will wait, he decides, elsewhere—

A few miles away is a creek bank with cool mud and drowsing frogs not yet wakened by night. Catfish doze at the bottom of the water and he sits with his back against a tree, smoothing his coat and breathing air quietly. One difficult aspect of corporeality has been his sensitivity to textures, pressures, details. Space and distance and propinquity feel meaningless to him, his new human friends remind him frequently of his violations concerning these, their rigid boundaries, so easily transgressed; but he can fall into distressing a wrinkle of fabric or a crease for hours, worrying at it, trying to decide if it means him any ill, feeling confused by its insistence. An object made out of the meeting of objects, an intersection which itself has become something else. It troubles him on the most incremental levels: where one side of his coat encounters the other and is sewn up along this divide; or, if he thinks about it, where a limb meets a torso, when does it shift from being one thing to becoming the other. He doesn't know why it frets him so badly but it is a feeling he thinks they would call irritation, he can chafe at a seam for days and he does not know why, but in his mental library he has filled several dozen treatises in his language, trying to anatomize the causes and possible reliefs—

(Once he saw a small girl pulling fretfully against her seatbelt, the roughness of it against her collarbone, her adults not understanding or paying heed, until she shouted in frustration _This is_ bothering _me!_ and he felt a thrill of recognition: that was it exactly, such things _bothered_ him—

(He especially understands because sometimes he has not been encapsulated in a vessel but has become vessel himself, celestial intent fused into its meat-hung skeleton, and the unrelenting graininess of that, the innumerable joinings and fractures and fault lines, all the stupidly abrasive sensations immediately feel all but overwhelming, it makes it difficult to speak or even think. Sensation-dulling substances alleviate the scratchy despair, when he can legitimately come by them, but he tries to fall back on his martial training, to bite down on something inwardly and press on, ignoring the protesting rasp and screech of _againstness_ pushing back in every joint and every follicle. Somehow the humans seem deaf to this, don't apprehend that slim paperswidth where each thing meets another. He can scarcely be aware of anything else, he longs for some single monotonous bass throb, an overwhelming sensation to blot out the querulous grating manyness—

But for now he is himself, pleasantly muted, a messenger in a vessel waiting for his charge, his ward. Conservatorship settles him and bleeds away the inner static in a similarly pleasing way. He is made to guard, to follow, to protect, and doing so calms and focuses his restlessness—

A cold wet herbal smell starts to rise from the grass. As darkness thickens, he draws his coat closer around himself and listens. Crickets and peepers begin their mate-chanting, fireflies cluster optimistically in the kudzu. Not only, he reflects, do incarnate beings not _mind_ those incessant segmented places of joining, they actively seek them out, desire the edge of convergence, to encounter the corner where surfaces meet and press fervently against one another, where they seek to defeat separation, seek to merge, desire that two or more should gather and be made one—

What does his charge ask for, this time? How will he serve, what complicated alien needs will be presented to him, as problems to solve—

The younger brother has spoken to him quietly, urgently, out of earshot, of what they call depression, being depressed. He is all bright concern, single-pointed, an inner lemon-yellow soul of soap or sunshine, wanting remedies other than the ethanol and other sources of oblivion his older brother consistently seeks out—

But he is unsure how to respond to these requests, he gets lost in his own Thomistic theses. On one side of the argument, he knows exactly what it is to feel everything too intensely, too consistently, too scathingly, and to need to mute it somehow, to gentle the constant rush of emotion, information, self-recrimination. Now he himself has tasted failure, knows what it means to be at fault, to blame, knows what it means to have destroyed beautiful innocent creations that can never be replaced, not ever. He cannot unhook himself off the rack for that, and neither can the man he guards—he understands fully, something he has swallowed and made into part of himself, evils he has incorporated. Whatever forgiveness means to these creatures it does not mean losing awareness of what you have done. Instead there are only discrete daily steps toward lowering the anguish to a bearable level, something through which one can somehow continue to move and breathe and live out one's being—

On another side (and there are more facets to this argument than on Indra's net) (which he has seen, draped across its snowy ceiling, the mountain palace of the Vedic heaven, innumerable stars stretched out for miles against a brilliant turquoise sky)—he considers that in his most restricted restrained trammelled form, he himself is also technically what the people would call, _depressed_. He has little emotional variation, no appetite to consume or enjoy anything, no particular interest in preserving his own existence. He has thought, if he were to try to explain to his charge, that he could tell him, using the metaphors of the man's passion for two-dimensional media: when I am not human I live in a black-and-white film—

(What he does not say is: when I am close to you it is as if everything has turned to color—)

What it was like, to find him for the first time. Screaming downward, hurtling furiously with all six wings flaming and every eye widened with holy rage, his entire being a blue-hot bolt ready to strike and rend and rip and sunder, yet remote and disinterested at heart because he was made this way, to smite and destroy and never to cease, without sentiment or regret or question. A decade, two decades, three decades, four decades, time he shot through, cometlike, himself torching away in shreds, still fearing he would be too late—

In the end he crashed against something indefinable, but it stopped him. An impassible artifact, wall-like, impenetrable, but not made of hell. He furled himself, sheathed his brilliance and studied it for another year, trying to find a way through. It was dark and thick and resisted attempts to enter. He drew on everything he knew and could not name it—

Through the solidity, though, he began to hear the voice. Faint, but a voice. Saying a name, another human name, not a prayer but a habit, just repeating the name as if that would replace a heartbeat or mimic another bodily rhythm. He listened a few months more until he could isolate the voice and until the other sounds ( _unspeakable suffering, unnameable vicious hatred_ ) finally faded. Then he knew exactly where and how to pierce—

With an incinerating flash he sliced through, only to encounter more undifferentiated density, as if he were now inside the wall itself. With none of his uncountable eyes could he see anything—

Still the voice, though, saying its one word over and over, in shades of acceptance and desperation and self-loathing and grief—

He cut again, and again, _again_ , slashed at and lacerated the substanceless stuff all around him, driving inward, ever inward, pushing to reach the sound, to get to the voice, the voice was so alone, so close to giving up entirely, he would find it, this was his mission, to reach it, to touch it, to pull—

One final stroke and he was—out, or in, he did not know, either on its other side or inside an innermost part of it, or perhaps it had dissolved utterly after all the storm of his onslaught. For a long moment he still saw nothing. His blade retracted and he held still, sensing. He occupied empty space, utterly dark, unilluminated. And then ringing out one more time the sound came, that voice screaming that name, only now he could hear it clearly, loudly, it clawed through the realm as distinct and defiant as a newborn's blistering cry, an attempt to be heard, to make contact with any other—

All at once it sprang up in his awareness as a sudden blaze, his nearness: dazzling in its primacy, its purity, a brightness so sudden it stung him to the quick. It was alive, it was the one alive thing in this place of utter stagnant death. And he reached out, blinded but certain, gripped, seized hold, and with the last of his strength he _flew_ —

And that was the day, they said, he was lost. They knew nothing. That was the day he began—

Heat became something more than applied Fourier transforms, and uniqueness more than a weak solution to any given partial differential equation. Colors became more than electromagnetic wavelengths ( _apple green, tawny, russet, flushed rose_ ) and sounds so much more than waves of pressure and displacement ( _I am tired, I am lonely, I am hurt, I am angry, I am ecstatic, I am satiated, I need your help, I need you_ )—

He found suddenly that it was late at night and he was standing beside the creek, one hand supporting him against the rough bark of the tree, his face wet, breathing harshly from somewhere far down in his throat. His larynx ached. Harder to insist, he thought distantly, that he reacted strictly to the transpersonal. There could be no question that his inhumanity drained away with every encounter. Sometimes he did see in color—

(They were driving down some interstate or another, along the infinite axis mundi of divided two-lane, and out the side window he glimpsed a styrofoam cup, skipping and tossing, driven by gusts from passing cars, moving and skidding, jerked beneath tires and crushed and bouncing back out, crumpled but unbroken, still cupping wind, back in the stream to circle and eddy again; and he realized that the fast-food logo on the cup gleamed _orange_ , sparking against the blacktop and the dirty mustard double-stripe, glowing in his eyes as vividly as a sudden uprush of flame—)

Perhaps they simply meant that indivisible wholeness in him gone. He had been halved and cut and gifted away, outside of his intactness, he had pulled it asunder to share with another, and now would be forever trying to claw back to himself, staggering from incompleteness, knowing somehow the righteous one held even more of him than he had shared originally, more of his icy blue charity, his pure wild grace—that now inside another body burned more of his own reality, more rightness, more belonging, more join blood call breath reach bone _bond_ , more home—

The prayer was back and this time happening _now_ , you gulp and shudder—

The brothers tend to intreat you only when they want something for each other, rarely for themselves, never when he just wants you for himself, wants you for yourself, and in any case this is not your assignment, your sole directive to assist in combat not console or encourage and certainly not to cleave, to wrap around, to press yourself as intimately as possible and—

_But what do they expect me to do when the best part of me dwells inside you—_

You reel, briefly, the call singing at your crystalline core; you command consciousness to cool and balance and steady itself, will it into stillness, consider languages, etymologies. For example, _grace_ only means: any unearned gift.

The gift is what has happened inside you, because of him. No one can take that from you now. They can keep him from you, he can keep himself from you, they can cut you into fragments of yourself but you get to keep that. And in addition right now you can see him, speak with him, hear him, help him. Its own sanctification. You straighten and fleet, circle, soar—

When you return to the now-dark parking lot, this time you crush closely against yourself, mute the feathered glory, shush it against your sides, although you aren't sure why, but you think perhaps you can be of no use and it would do no good to materialize; to mislead him would be worse somehow. Suddenly wary and perhaps what they would call ashamed, soundless. He is there (now is now) slumped against the trunk of his car as though unable to hold himself upright much longer. A half-drunk beer bottle dangles loosely from his left hand, droplets of condensation fall to the pavement, his right hand presses temples between thumb and fingers, a reflexive movement you know well, as if to wipe away eyestrain fatigue fading strength—

He looks up, past you, through you, out into the weedy field beyond you, eyes brimming and mouth set, you can tell he is stubbornly refusing to say your name aloud, if you had breath to hold you would hold it, if you heard his voice crack across that single syllable probably you would have no choice, your consciousness would resolve immediately into stuttering matter whether you willed it or no—

Yet what you want he does not, you know this, know it in the increasingly animated marrow of your porous bones, he would not want to take the two cleft pieces of you and him and try to bend them back together, meld into an entirely other, intrinsically new thing, not when one belongs to you, not when you are you ( _I am me, I do myself_ ), even though this is the form in which this should happen, instinct tells you that he should grip you back with the exact same matching shape and force, that he should refuse to let you go except you bless him—

While you are frozen in indecision, as for so many of his years, he suddenly laughs, a raw coarse sound, and without warning lobs the bottle far over your head into the field. Faint glittery sound as it rolls down a gravel slope without breaking. Then leverages his length from the back of the car, spins on a boot heel, and goes back inside the motel room. The door snicks behind him and all the air all around you abruptly vacated, before you have even had a chance to move—

And it is always like this, nothing ends in nothing, it is always the way it always is. Perhaps this is the only way for these particular halves to confront each other, you think dimly: their ongoing evasion, a connection all the more evident from its failure to intersect, to yield and cling. Your charge, you have noticed, often finds a kind of coherence with others through his avoidance of their nearness to him, perhaps separation offers an inverted form of collision—

(A night in an ugly alleyway when your newly filled skin swelled taut with wrath and you sucked back snot and saliva and ancient curses and assaulted him with both your hands, threw him from ragged wall to wall like a damp chewed plaything, reminded him forcibly, with bruises and split tissue, of the perdition you could so easily thrust him back into at any time you chose, and amidst all the motion wondered if he could feel the way you actually clung to him through the violence, pulled him to you more closely as much as pushing him back, your mouth huffing into his from an inch away, thinking in a kind of desperate fury: _I have to beat my naked fists against your flesh because that is the only way my skin is ever allowed to touch yours—_

What you can do (what you may ask for, may receive)—what you allow yourself only because eternity continues to permit it—is to watch. You may safeguard, you may protect—at a distance, with restraint, so that he does not know, because your devotion unsettles him, the artless truth of it, as much as your vessel's eyes disconcert him (you know the effect they have, perversely you let that continue because it amuses you, enjoy deploying those intently guileless nightsky eyes to their fullest darkest blue extent)—

You will wait here, then. You coalesce soundlessly, out of earshot behind a drinks machine, bathed in its dim glimmer, the hum of sodium lights across the parking lot, and flatten the fabric of your vessel's clothing around you, nestle into its worn comforting shape as you stay vigilant for any meanness, any intended harm.

Inside their room the brothers now sleep uneasily, corneas flicker behind closed lids, dream of ten thousand tasks and their irresolute conclusions. Something hurts your throat, or perhaps it is inside your ribs, caged about by sigils and wards. There is nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. Above the creek's treeline, the moon rises, late and low, and she is only a battered crescent.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read this far, a) who even _are_ you and b) thank you so goldang much. I [tumbl](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com) and [tweet](http://twitter.com/jsalowe) so come find me and complain.
> 
> This isn't as theft-heavy as [its other half](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1912569) but I still stole references from a couple of things; the science mostly comes from having been partnered to not one but two theoretical physicists, and the line upon which to me everything hinges comes from [this embarrassing pop song](http://youtu.be/9yZ1uI5yPbY). My wing language is straight out of Yeats's "[Leda and the Swan](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/leda-and-swan)." And, of course, the whole thing owes a huge debt to the Platonic idea (from the _Symposium_ ) about people (if not angels) roaming to and fro on the earth seeking their other halves.


End file.
